All of these gloomy obsequies of repentance having been observed, Gingrich gave a stirring example of why he is hands-down the best extemporaneous demagogue in contemporary America. Having purged his soul of all guilty transgressions, he turned his attention to the far graver sins bedeviling the American nation.

If we look at history from the mid-1960s, we’ve gone from a request for toleration to an imposition of intolerance. We’ve gone from a request to understand others to a determination to close down those who hold traditional values. I think that we need to be very aggressive and very direct. The degree to which the left is prepared to impose intolerance and to drive out of existence traditional religion is a mortal threat to our civilization and deserves to be taken head-on and described as what it is, which is the use of government to repress the American people against their own values.

That is as good an example as any of cheap grace as practiced by seasoned statesmen like Gingrich—a bid for redemption turned on its head to provide a forum for one of the Republican Party’s favorite pastimes: taking opportunistic swipes at the dreaded liberal bogeyman. How quickly one forgets one’s own moral lapses when one can consider the manifold harms inflicted on our nation by godless leftists!

....

Some more libertarian-leaning Republicans have in fact pushed back against the religious right. Former House majority leader Dick Armey expressed his profound distaste for the tactics of the religious right in 2006—from the safety of the sidelines—by blasting its leadership in unequivocal terms:

[James] Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies. I pray devoutly every day, but being a Christian is no excuse for being stupid. There’s a high demagoguery coefficient to issues like prayer in schools. Demagoguery doesn’t work unless it’s dumb, shallow as water on a plate. These issues are easy for the intellectually lazy and can appeal to a large demographic. These issues become bigger than life, largely because they’re easy. There ain’t no thinking.

...In September 2010 Armey took one step further in his reconciliation with the people he had called thugs and bullies when he announced that a GOP majority in Congress would again take up the abortion fight, which was only right and proper for those who held such a sincere moral conviction. When the Republicans duly won the House two months later, they did precisely that. State legislatures across the country followed suit: Ohio, Texas, and Virginia enacted the most severe abortion restrictions in any legislative session in memory. Suddenly Armey didn’t seem to have any problem with social issues preempting his economic agenda.

...

But Rand’s philosophy found most of its adherents in the libertarian wing of the party, a group that overlaps with, but is certainly not identical to, the “business conservatives” who fund the bulk of the GOP’s activities. There has always been a strong strain of rugged individualism in America, and the GOP has cleverly managed to co-opt that spirit to its advantage. The problem is that Rand proclaimed at every opportunity that she was a militant atheist who felt nothing but contempt for Christianity as a religion of weaklings possessing a slave mentality. So how do Republican candidates manage to bamboozle what is perhaps the largest single bloc in their voting base, the religious fundamentalists, about this? Certainly the ignorance of many fundamentalist values voters about the wider world and the life of the mind goes some distance toward explaining the paradox: GOP candidates who enthuse over Rand at the same time as they thump their Bibles never have to explain this stark contradiction because most of their audience is blissfully unaware of who Ayn Rand was and what she advocated. But voters can to some extent be forgiven their ignorance, because politicians have grown so skillful at misdirecting them about their intentions.

The Republicans have cynically used the extremely religious like a two-dollar banjo, and it's come back to smack them in the eye like a cheap overstressed string.

The whole thesis here about an unfortunate takeover by religious extremists as foreign invaders is complete nonsense. These were dimwitted masses, recruited cynically and intentionally by oligarchs, to serve as shock troops. Actually, more as cannon fodder.

The story of the last three or four decades is of the rich turning the US back into a two-tiered society not seen since the gilded age. How exactly they pulled this off amounts to details, in the scheme of things. In this case it involved duping millions of gullible voters into voting against their own self-interest, using centuries-old techniques having to do with religion and various other fantasies.

What you miss, or more likely willfully ignore, is that this is all that religion is, and all it ever was. It's a power play, used to convince people to let you continue to steal their stuff.

This is just a comment on a blog, but for a full treatment of this topic, see the following:

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You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your poo. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires.

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The problem with your argument is that Republicans have consistently gone out of their way to say that the complete and utter imbalance of this nations wealth by a few is something that should be embraced because it means capitalism is working.

To me the opposite is true. A monetary philosophy is a means to an end, not the end itself. The end is a nation that grows, thrives, and allows people to get ahead - the American Dream. For a very long time now this has not been happening. For those of you that are down on welfare spending and more government, think about the idea that the reason these things are happening is not because "the government wants you to be dependent on them" which is an absurd statement, but because there is not enough money going around to promote all the things that need to happen to create more wealth - spending by the middle class. All that money is going to, let's say, Cayman Island and Swiss Bank accounts. And it's so bad that you will happily pull the voting lever for a guy who actually does that. Bain Capital is not an industry, It never made anything. It's only purpose in life was to buy companies and try to save them or liquidate them - whichever made it's investors more money, regardless of the effect on our economy. People got filthy rich(er) off of the legal maneuverings of a bunch of lawyers at the expense of the regular folks out there, the ones we need to have money to spend the most.

Republicans used to be blue collar thinking people but now they are motivated by two things, religion and the false idea that opportunity still exists for people willing to work hard.

Democratic voters have their issues as well, but "worshiping government" is not one of them. At least with government we have a shot at electing people that will screw us over. Companies - not so much.